Botched lyrics come before Packers 31-25 victory over Steelers

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Christina Aguilera botches the lyrics of the national anthem before the NFL football Super Bowl XLV game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Updated at 2:42 PM PDT on Monday, Feb 7, 2011

Aaron Rodgers had a much better Super Bowl performance than Christina Aguilera.

While the Green Bay quarterback was leading his team to a 31-25 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV in Dallas, Aguilera was feeling shame over her pregame rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," in which she joined a long line of celebs to botch the words.

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The five-time Grammy winner mangled the fourth line of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Her version: “Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, what so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last gleaming.”

The correct lyrics: “Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming.”

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The "Dirrty" singer later took an immediate beating on Twitter and later expressed her hope that fans could would forgive her for flubbing the lyrics.

"I can only hope that everyone could feel my love for this country and that the true spirit of its anthem still came through," she said in a statement after the performance.

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With clips of the song still reverberating on cable news shows late Monday, Aguilera won a rare token of sympathy from fellow pop star Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas.

"You know what? It's such a huge venue, your nerves take a hold of you," Fergie said on a radio show, according to Us. "I completely understand. She's one of the best singers of our time. Nobody can take that away from you... But you get nervous at these things. We're human."

Fergie, who also faced Twitterverse potshots on Super Bowl Sunday for her halftime performance, copped to her own "pitchy" notes.

Aguilera is only the latest star to screw up Francis Scott Key's words. Roseanne Barr screeched through a painful rendition at a San Diego Padres game in 1990, eding by grabbing her crotch and spitting. At the 2001 Indy 500, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler ended with "home of the Indianapolis 500" instead of "the brave."

Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis missed a high note while singing the anthem at a New Jersey Nets game in 1993, then said in mid-song, "I'll make up for it." Finally, crooner Robert Goulet, who performed the song countless times, gained perhaps unfair notoriety when he screwed up a line in the song before Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, fought Sonny Liston in 1965. Instead of referring to the "dawn's early light," Goulet sang "dawn's early night." The flub, minor in retrospect, haunted him and made his obituaries when he died in 2007.

"One word is all I messed up, and everyone built it up from that time on into something else entirely," he would say later.